


One More Day

by KillNatalie



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Cannibalism, Gore, Horror, M/M, Murder, sex (sort of)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-25
Updated: 2013-06-25
Packaged: 2017-12-16 04:20:40
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,764
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/857721
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KillNatalie/pseuds/KillNatalie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>During a case, John and Sherlock become trapped in a cave with their guide, who is terribly injured. Without any food or water, they consider that they may have to resort to something unthinkable.</p>
            </blockquote>





	One More Day

The hills of Scotland roll like the arches of a great dragon’s back, the dips and rises of a massive earthen spine; and the steely ocean that turns upon itself as it crashes upon the rocky cliffs roars and hisses with the spray of water, as if the beast of the land were groaning and snorting steam from out its cavernous nostrils. The world is very much alive here, even the rivers and glassy lakes seeming to whisper into the open air with hushed voices, the trees shuffling their leaves to one another on the rolling expanse of land, as coy as faeries. And it was here, beside towering caves that loomed over the landscape with open, frightened mouths, that a particular set of men found themselves in quite an unfortunate predicament. 

Sherlock stood like a gravestone on the edge of the massive hill, hands folded behind the small of his back, dark hair bristled by the fingers of the wind. The horizon seemed to disappear at his feet, as if taking a single step forward might send him plunging down into infinity, curls floating above his scalp in a halo of blackness. The atmosphere was overcast and chilly, and John found himself very much wishing that he had brought his gloves. Somewhere beyond the curve of the hill a heard of sheep bleated. 

The train ride, and subsequent ferry, from London to the Inner Hebrides was a long and mostly peaceful one, though John was certainly acclimated to Sherlock’s incessant and rather imperious chatter. Terribly bored, the detective used every passing stranger as a minor exercise of his wit, knitting his long, pale fingers together and holding them over his mouth as if in prayer as he murmured, _“Oh, gods, poor man, none of those children are his; that young woman really should change the focus of her A-levels, what’s she going to do with a concentration in Hebrew?; what a shame that doctor’s about to retire, his wife will probably leave him for her much more wealthy lover-- oh, don’t look at me like that, John, he’s got one of his own…”_ A black crow, feasting on the carrion of the world’s lesser intellect. 

A series of rather grisly murders (Sherlock’s favourite) had taken place on the arches of that island, and the detective found the rather macabre state of the corpses perfectly to his liking; he’d spent many hours in the morgue that week with his hands buried to the wrists in open abdomens, the hot stench of thickened blood rising into the air like steam from the wound of a deer shot in the snow, clicking his tongue in interest as he mused aloud, _“Yes, but where did he put all the intestines?”_

And now, standing on the zenith of that rolling arch, Sherlock was in the belly of the beast and looked so perfectly content with it all, perhaps only mildly disappointed because the landscape was not scattered with corpses. John sometimes wondered what the difference between Sherlock and the criminals he chased was, and came up with nothing. 

A young man met them on the hill to guide them to here the bodies had been found. His accent was thick, slurring, heavy, and while John happened to find it somewhat quaint and interesting, the tiny, almost invisible, snarl of Sherlock’s mouth revealed how tawdry he found the whole thing to be. John wondered what Sherlock knew about the man just based on his accent, and inversely what the man- a boy, almost- thought of Sherlock’s sharp, posh London tongue. 

The cave greeted them with a large, open mouth, and even the earthen structure seemed sad somehow, as if it was wailing and sobbing because of the chaos and destruction that had occurred within it. Beside it, the ocean rushed and roared with waves, the wind carrying the spray and chilling the three of them. They took a few steps inside, the sounds of their feet echoing all around them, and the young man chattered on:

“…apparently some tourists came in ‘ere and the smell was somethin’ terrible.” He clicked on his torch and began scanning the wet walls with the circle of yellow light. “Couple Americans, said they could tell it was human just based on the stench, but I think they were lyin’. How can ya even tell based on smell? Coulda been a lamb that wandered away from the heard, coulda been a dog…”

“But it wasn’t,” Sherlock interrupted, voice sharp, probably bored. He was scanning around with his own torch, eyes narrowed and shining like silver coins in the dimness. “I don’t have time to dilly-dally, where were the bodies _exactly?_ ”

The young man acted as if he was unaware of Sherlock’s tone and John was silently thankful. Arguments between Sherlock and their clients, their witnesses, everyone in general, halted their work entirely. “I’m lookin’, I’m lookin’…ah, right here!” The torch illuminated a small opening in the cavern wall, so hidden by a blanket of shadow that they might have missed it entirely. It wasn’t quite tall enough to walk through and would have required them to crouch to pass through it. Their guide explained, “If ya squat down and walk through, it opens up into a big open space. There were somethin’ like three bodies-”

“Four,” Sherlock corrected.

“-four bodies in there, and plenty’a room for more.” The boy scratched under his chin. A farm boy, had seen plenty of death, probably aided in some himself. John didn’t need to be brilliant to understand that. 

The detective answered, “Fantastic. Obviously we’ll need to go inside.” He strolled up to the opening, inspected around the edges with his torch, then ducked down and made his way through the oval opening in the cave wall. The sounds of his footsteps became less pronounced the farther inside he went. His voice came from inside the passage, “John, make a note of this: there are marks where the bodies were dragged…blast, stupid bloody police, they’ve gotten their footprints all over it…but I can say with relative certainty there was only one perpetrator-- _oh!_ ” He made a little sound of surprise, and to John it sounded almost childlike with glee. “He’s left a finger behind, so _that’s_ where the digit went…” 

John finished making a note on the pad of paper and made a nod at the guide before doubling over and making his way into the stony passage. The interior was cool, even cooler than the rest of the cave, and every clacking sound of tiny pebbles shifting beneath his feet seemed to swirl around him. The width of the passage was so narrow that John could hardly move his arms enough to reach into his pocket and find his own black torch. After but a few steps, darkness consumed him and he suppressed a rising sense of panic building in his chest. 

“Sherlock?” he called, his own voice sounding almost deafening in his ears. “Sherlo— _oh._ ” His forehead bumped into what he assumed was the back of the detective’s legs, and he found that he could once again stand up straight. It was dark, as black as pitch, and almost immediately after rising John found himself disoriented. He reached into his pocket and clicked the button his torch, pointing it at the dirt and stone floor, using the yellow spot to focus his gaze. 

Sherlock was darting around in the dark, his footsteps light and swift like that of a fawn, muttering to himself. “The bodies were so terribly mangled, why keep all the pieces in one place? Why not toss them into the ocean? I suppose that would require intellect, which most people so frequently undervalue…” 

John was examining the entrance to the opening. It looked as if it had been larger at some point, but at least half of it was covered by large boulders now. He was holding the end of his torch in his mouth so he could make a note in his pad of paper when the young man’s voice came from the other side, sounding far away. “I’m comin’ in there!” he called. Sherlock barely suppressed a groan of annoyance. Somewhere in the cave a trail of pebbles fell from the wall and onto the floor, sounding like the trickle of rain drops. 

“As if we need more people mucking up our crime scene.” The origin of his voice was untraceable in the darkness. The pebbles fell again, the sound larger and heavier. The pitter-patter of Sherlock’s feet halted. He seemed to be listening. The guide’s footsteps came closer. Something inside the cave seemed to shift, to groan like a giant awakening from slumber, and suddenly John was illuminated from behind and a hand on his shoulder was tugging him backwards into the blackness, and Sherlock was crying, _“John!”_

The light from Sherlock’s torch illuminated the entrance to the open space just in time for John to see the young man emerge from the stone mouth, hands on either side of the opening as he pulled himself out, and a flurry of stones of all sizes coming tumbling downward on top of him. The young man- the _boy_ \- shrieked and tried to leap forward, but Sherlock pulled John backwards and he fell onto the hard, damp ground, entirely blind, searching for his torch in utter blackness. He saw the beam of light, heard a deafening crash and a scream of terror and pain, and managed to grope for his light source. Lying on his back, legs kicking out at nothing, John pointed the light where the exit of the rocky clearing used to be. 

The fact that the boy was still alive was astounding, as his entire lower body from the waist down was pinned to the floor by massive, heavy boulders. He seemed to have fallen unconscious for a moment, but was stirring again, his hands twitching and groping at the floor, his head rolling on his neck, eyelids fluttering. Something dark and wet was seeping out beneath the largest stone—almost as tall as John was—and the doctor looked away from it, not wanting to see it, wanting to pretend it wasn’t there. Sherlock had jumped away and was sitting on his backside, propped up on his arms and panting heavily, bright blue eyes large, but a metre and a half from the fallen stones. John may have muttered something but the words held no meaning. 

The boy started to awaken and he was making nonsense sounds, babbling incoherently, and when he turned his head and saw his pelvis crushed flat beneath the boulder he shrieked, fingers scrambling across the floor as if trying to pull himself away, his mouth open and full of blood, teeth red and terrifying, and John thought for a brief moment that he might actually succeed and rip his entire body in half at the waist in an attempt to escape. Both detectives rushed to him, tumbling over themselves in the limited light, deafened by the unrelenting cries of terror and pain. _“OH MY GOD!”_ he was crying. _“OH MY GOD!”_

John knelt down beside him and instructed him to calm down, but the boy was spitting blood, moaning like an animal. His face was wet with tears. Both John and Sherlock tried to move the rocks, but they must have weighed tonnes and tonnes, far too heavy for two men to move on their own. Sherlock tried to use his mobile but the rocks blocked any signal that might have saved them, and he rushed around the perimeter of the cave as John wiped the blood from the boy’s chin.

“I don’t want to die,” he moaned, looking up at John, his skin white as white. He really did look like a boy then. “Please, please, I don’t want to die…” The rest of his words were drowned in uncontrollable sobbing. 

A few hours passed with no changes. The boy slipped in and out of consciousness a few times, sometimes waking and thinking that John and Sherlock were other people—at one point some friends of his, another his father and someone else—and during this time there was no sign of escape. John knew that the boy was going to die, that even if somehow someone found them within the next few hours he would probably be hurt beyond repair, but at least he might be able to die in a hospital bed and not on a cold cavern floor pinned beneath a rock. And with that came another realisation: they were stuck. Watching this boy die was like watching their own fate unravel before them. Who would even know they were there? Who would be able to find the entrance to this small clearing, who would be able to hear the sound of their cries for help if dozens of massive rocks closed them off from the rest of the world?

John managed to gather a small amount of water dripping from the walls of the cave in the cup of his hands and fed it to the boy. Sherlock was sitting in the edge of the cave somewhere, using the blackness to think. The boy wept and cried for his mother. John felt like crying, too. 

When the guide slipped into unconsciousness again John used his torch to find Sherlock and sat beside him. The detective was sitting cross-legged, fingers steepled in front of his lips. His pupils widened when John illuminated him with the torch, pools of ink engulfing the bright blue. “Our torches won’t last forever,” he said suddenly, his voice emotionless, clinical. “We have no food. We can gather some water from the cave, but how long can we survive on palm-fulls of water?” As if to answer his own question, he said, “Three weeks. I think we can make three weeks, maybe a bit longer if we conserve energy.” His eyes darted in the darkness to where the boy was resting. “He may have until tomorrow. It’s damp in here. The corpse will smell.” 

“What are we going to do?” he asked, and for the first time fear trembled his voice. And Sherlock, who knew everything and saw everything, answered, 

“I don’t know.”

Sherlock was right in that the boy did live into the next day, though he was so weak that he couldn’t even lift his head and the words that tumbled from his mouth were hardly words at all, just slurs of pain. His lips were blue and trembled constantly. John had removed his white undershirt and allowed it to soak up water from the cavern, and the three of them took turns sucking the moisture from it like baby animals sucking on their mother’s tit. While their guide was unconscious John examined the massive wound as much as he could. White, white bone in shattered pieces poked up from the boy’s hips like shards of glass caked in brown blood. 

“One more day,” he asked the boy. “Do you think you can make it one more day?” He stroked the boy’s dark brown hair, wet and tangled with sweat. The boy said nothing, just babbled. 

Their stomachs growled with hunger and sucking on the shirt wasn’t enough to keep the tightness of thirst from their throats. They decided to keep their torches off to conserve battery power unless checking on the injured party and spent most of their time sitting in the darkness. Things moved inside the cavern, rats probably, their tiny clawed fingers scattering and scratching across the stones. John felt an insect crawl across his hand and yelped, shaking it away, hands flailing and brushing wildly over his body as if he was covered in them. Sherlock laughed. Something about it was dark. 

A total of six days in the cave and somehow the boy was still alive, though just barely. John ached with hunger, shook with thirst, the terrible sensations of need possessing him until all he could think about was eating, drinking, sleeping, and—for a reason he couldn’t explain—fucking, as if somehow the only thing in the world that could have cured him of his suffering was a good fucking shag. In the horrible darkness John would have fucked anything that sat on his lap if it meant he didn’t have to think about the screeching agony in his stomach. 

At some point, Sherlock spoke beside him and the voice came through the blindness like a moan of terror. _“He ate them,”_ he whispered. _“That’s why they were torn apart. That’s where the organs went. The rocks were blocking the door and he ate them.”_

“How did he get out then?” John asked, keeping his voice low as if to hide their conversation from the third member. And once again Sherlock said he didn’t know.

“We need our strength,” Sherlock said, and his voice was syrupy with implication. 

“Please,” John pleaded. “I can’t.”

“We need to.”

“One more day,” he begged. “Wait one more day and if no one comes--”

The other snapped, his voice ragged with whisper, “No one is going to come! We can’t signal, we can’t call for help! Look at him, the fact that he’s made it this long is a bloody miracle!” And with that, Sherlock clicked on his torch and revealed the other, mangled and crushed. The boy’s finger tapped slowly, rhythmically, on the floor. Tap—tap—tap. 

“One more day,” John repeated. “Please.”

And Sherlock echoed, snarling, “One more day.” A spider skittered by his hand and he snatched it up by its spindly leg, ripping it apart with his teeth. 

The next day came both too quickly and too slowly. Time passed differently in that cave, the illusion of a linear timeframe snapped like a twig. John felt as if he was living in neither the past nor the present nor the future, but in every point in time at once. There was no sun to tell when it was day, no evening cooing of birds to tell when it was night, the only way in which to tell the hour his wristwatch (his mobile had died the day prior, Sherlock was saving the battery on his as much as possible). Sometimes he slept and awoke to find only an hour, or minutes, had gone by, and sometimes he slept for the majority of the day, wide awake and alert in the dead of night. When he emerged from sleep on the seventh day, there was a buzzing in the air that told him that Sherlock was awake. The other must have known that John was conscious now, because within seconds he was saying in a low voice, “We have to do it now.”

And still John protested, “We can’t. Sherlock, we can’t.” It wasn’t that he thought the boy could live, or that they had any other option at that point, but he couldn’t imagine doing it. John had seen death, he had known it intimately as he investigated the corpses of stabbing victims, children with their arms removed, women assaulted so horribly by men that they wished that they were dead, and in rare cases he had even been the cause of it. But then was another beast altogether, and death wasn’t even the final step. John would have to carry the deed inside him and taste it on his tongue. He shook with terror, no longer caring how weak and pathetic he sounded, just experiencing pure, unfiltered horror. “Please don’t make me do it, Sherlock,” he begged. “Please, please.”

The torch was on. The boy was lying on the floor, motionless, and John hoped that maybe he had already died and they wouldn’t have to do it themselves. But Sherlock crawled over to him, his clothes already hanging loose on his body, that small amount of softness that had gathered round his middle now reduced to concave thinness, and he was crawling like a spider down a web, starving. 

“It’s only been a week,” John said, his voice thin and exhausted. He had read stories about sailors trapped out at sea with no food and they lasted weeks and weeks without resorting to this. But Sherlock was taking a rock into his hand now, knelt down beside the boy. And, god, the boy stirred beneath the light, trying desperately to lift himself on his hands. The lower half of his face was sprayed with blood. Specks of red. 

“And how long are you willing to wait?” Sherlock asked, his eyes large, his teeth looking sharp, blinding white in the light of John’s torch. 

And John begged, “Just another day. We can…we can prolly even wait till the end of the week, Sherlock, _please._ ”

“The meat will go bad,” he replied, and it was so grotesque that John thought he might vomit. 

The rock rose up. The boy lifted his head and looked at John, and John’s mouth fell open. Something weak creaked out of his throat. Sherlock made a low sound and then he was smashing the rock into the boy’s head, a red spray shooting into the air in a mist of blood. Sherlock crushed the skull again and again, his teeth bared, his brows furrowed, his long black jacket swaying and swishing like the tail of a animal, a devil. John had fallen back on his hips and was covering his mouth with his hand, gasping into it. At some point he started crying, but by then Sherlock was resting his backside on his calves, panting heavily, his face a mask of blood. 

“We can’t eat the brain anyway,” he explained, but John wasn’t listening.

As soon as the boy was dead, a deep red halo of blood circling his head, Sherlock seemed to realise that he had nothing with which to cut the body. He roared in anger, the sound filling the cavern like a fog, and put the end of his torch between his teeth, drowning his pale, bony hands in yellow light as he worked quickly to sharpen one rock against another, trying to turn it into some sort of makeshift knife. The deep grinding sound of the rocks thinned and sharpened until, in the corner of the dark space, John could hear the rock becoming more pointed. Sherlock was huddled over, lit only from the front so that his silhouette jostled and twitched as he worked. He was huffing and grunting like a troll. For just the briefest moment John considered killing him and as soon as the thought left him John considered killing himself. 

There was a swish of fabric. Sherlock moved. John didn’t want to look. He heard the terrible sounds of flesh being punctured, the splash of blood gushing onto the floor, and he could smell the heat of the boy’s insides. When he did open his eyes, Sherlock had removed his jacket and rolled up the sleeves of his white shirt, up to his wrists deep red, his chest and shirt marked with both splatters and handprints of the same colour. Skin lily white, hair as black as an oil slick, Sherlock looked like a vampire, a monster with a human form, and John moaned aloud as he tore a fat slice of flesh from the boy’s flank. He could see the external peachy colour of his skin, the thin yellow layer of bubbling, corn-coloured fat beneath it, and then the deep red of the muscle. The prize. 

Suddenly, Sherlock’s voice came to him and it no longer sounded like his voice. Deep, baritone, but rough with some sort of terrible desire, he growled, _“Come here!”_ The strip of flesh was in his hand, oh, gods, it was in his fucking hand like a piece of fabric, but John was so delirious, and he was so god damn hungry and thirsty and the darkness was around him and god, god, god forgive him, please _god._

It all happened in a sort of dream state. John didn’t taste anything, didn’t feel anything. All he knew was that he wasn’t so hungry anymore, that something sticky and coppery was quenching his thirst, that there was this nauseated tearing and squelching sound all around him. Sherlock had laid his torch down between them, lighting just enough of the body for them to take turns ripping off big, meaty chunks. Some of the muscle was too thick and hard to eat, some was so soft that it melted like butter in their mouths. They sucked the water from the rag of John’s discarded shirt until they were both heavy and full and satisfied, and then they turned off the torch and sat in the darkness on different ends of the cave. Sherlock’s voice had returned to its usual cool tone when he tried to tell John something about preserving the meat and John told him with perfect clarity that if he spoke again he would kill him, he would, he would. 

He took the damp cloth and wiped at his mouth and jaw, tried to clean off his shaking hands, but there just wasn’t enough moisture to it to get it all, and he could feel how sticky he was and what all that meant. Even in the darkness he knew that on the other end of the cavern Sherlock was sitting with his back against the wall, face and shirt and hands covered in blood, reddened fingers steepled in front of his bowed lips. The raven and his carrion. 

John either fell asleep or passed out and for some reason he dreamt that he was kissing, then fucking, Sherlock in that cave. The other snarled and mounted him like an animal and John didn’t even fight it, not when his friend lubed up his prick with a handful of the dead boy’s blood, not when he put his bloody fingers in John’s mouth and made him suck the fluid off; not when his palms and knees were pressed into the cold, damp floor and Sherlock was laughing, positively enjoying himself. He didn’t fight, not at all. 

Something was happening when he awoke. There was movement inside the cavern. John was so delirious that he hardly knew where he was. The world spun in the darkness, no up or down or left or right discernible. His belly was full. John tried not to think about it. 

He could see something bright, an electric blue-white, somehow high above him. Hardly awake, he murmured, “Sher…lock?”

“Be quiet!” The other hissed, and John realised that somehow he had managed to scale the wall of rocks like some sort of lizard and was holding up his mobile. A few tiny stones tumbled to the ground as he moved. John rolled his tongue in his mouth and could taste something there. Suddenly, Sherlock was making a gasping, excited. “Oh my g…” The light moved in the darkness, thinning as the mobile was pressed to Sherlock’s ear. “He—hello? Hello? _God, yes!_ ” 

John rested his back against the wall. He was so tired and dirty. What day was it?

“We’re trapped in the cave on the south-west isle of the Inner Hebrides, send an excavation team. For the love of god, get us out of here!”

Eventually, Sherlock managed to climb down the wall, jumping down about a metre from the floor and landing with a small _unf_ sound. He scrambled about in the darkness. “John?” he called. “John!” Hands fumbled and found the doctor’s shoulders, shaking him. He felt Sherlock kneel down beside him. “They’re going to get us out of here,” Sherlock was saying. When John didn’t say anything, the detective shook him again. “John?”

His tongue was heavy in his mouth. It felt like cotton. “I told you I wanted to wait another day,” he whispered. Sherlock said nothing. 

At some point the screech of drills and the pounding of shovels and picks surrounded them, and the rocks containing them crumbled into a plume of dust. The men were carrying lights and John and Sherlock covered their eyes against them like frightened bats. Someone saw the body and yelled, cursed; someone else saw them covered in blood and the entire team stopped. John asked them softly if he could have a blanket. Sherlock wanted a phone charger. A spider crawled over John’s hand and he didn’t move to dispel it. 

Someone finally asked, “What happened?”

Before Sherlock had a chance to speak, John’s tongue clicked in his mouth, his head rolling a bit on his neck, and he answered, “I just wanted to wait one more day.”

**Author's Note:**

> This was a request from a tumblr user, but I took quite a bit of creative liberties with this so I wouldn't be surprised if this turned out nothing like what she wanted. I was inspired by this story I heard as a child about a group of pirates lost at sea who decide to eat one of their crew to survive. During the night prior, the chosen man goes insane with worry, only for the entire lot to be rescued the next morning. I thought this was terribly funny and decided to make my own adaptation of similar events. Also, I just love the idea of Sherlock killing and eating someone, don't you?


End file.
